Going Beyond the UC Native American Tuition Waiver at Berkeley Law

Berkeley Law to eliminate tuition for Native American students

By Karen Sloan, Reuters, 5-18-22

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Summary

The school expects 15 to 18 Native American students to qualify for new scholarship program in the next two or three years

Fewer than 1% of law students nationwide are Native American

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The University of California Berkeley School of Law is aiming to increase its Native American enrollment by picking up the tab for students’ tuition. The school said this week that it will cover all tuition for current and future students who are both California residents and members of federally registered tribes. Administrators said they hope the program will make Berkeley Law a destination for Native American students and help the school expand its Indian Law offerings.*

Berkeley is the latest elite law school to eliminate tuition for at least some underrepresented students. Both Yale Law School and Stanford Law School recently said they will erase tuition for students from low-income families.

Native Americans comprised fewer than 1% of first-year law students nationwide this academic year, and Berkeley had only one in its new class, according to American Bar Association data. Native Americans make up just 0.4% of all lawyers nationally, the ABA figures show. “Chipping away at the barriers to attendance—and cost is huge—is one part of changing this,” said Kristen Theis-Alvarez, Berkeley Law’s dean of admission and financial aid, in a statement on the school's new program.

The University of California system said in April that would provide financial aid to cover tuition and student fees for the state’s Native American students. But that program only covers about $14,000 of the $59,000 per-student cost of Berkeley's J.D. program, so the law school will funnel existing financial aid to cover the remaining $45,000 annual tuition. Berkeley Law officials said they hope to expand the program to Native American students from federally recognized tribes who aren’t California residents.

The program will start in the fall, and a spokeswoman said the school anticipates that between 15 and 18 students will participate in the next two to three years. The program is projected to cost between $300,000 and $500,000 a year initially. Meanwhile, the nearby University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco is in the process of adopting a new name following a public outcry over its namesake’s history of violence against Native Americans. Serranus Hastings, a former California Supreme Court Justice who founded the school in 1878, financed and promoted “Indian-hunting raids” that are believed to have killed at least 283 men, women and children in the 1850s.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/berkeley-law-eliminate-tuition-native-american-students-2022-05-18/.

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*As noted in a prior blog post, UC hopes to circumvent the Prop 209 ban on affirmative action in California by dealing only with federally-recognized tribes which have a degree of sovereignty, according to UC president Drake. See:

http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/05/looking-ahead.html.

Presumably, the same logic would apply if the US Supreme Court bans affirmative action in admissions in the upcoming Harvard and U of North Carolina decisions.